


Desterrada (Exiled)

by zempasuchil



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-17 20:57:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zempasuchil/pseuds/zempasuchil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel takes the woman Yeimi, a Cuban immigrant who prays to the Saints and Orishas of Santería, as a vessel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desterrada (Exiled)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aesc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesc/gifts).



> for aesc in castielfest: _Always-a-female-vessel!Cas_  
>  In this AU, Novaks are gender-swapped.

The secret is, Castiel knows Yeimi. Castiel has spent long, long months in this body with her memories rippling underneath, and knows to never talk about her. She remembers the way Dean looked disgusted at the thought of taking a vessel, as if it was something only demons did. Castiel didn't have a choice.

Yeimi has memories of her family that Castiel never experienced, but some days she wonders: if she were put right back in the moment of those memories, in that house, in that family, if she had to be Yeimi - would Yeimi's body would respond in the same way it always did? Without a single direction from Cass? She's heard Sam and Dean talk about muscle memory as they load their weapons, as though the smoothness of their movements comes from comfort and not just the efficiency of a well-made tool. As though the body can be a comfortable thing.

If she found herself in Yeimi’s body and in her home, would she lean into her husband's touch instinctively? Would she know Clara's voice in a crowd? If she closes her eyes and listens to music, her feet almost know how to dance.

And did it go the other way? The day that Yeimi woke up bruised in a warehouse to two strange men calling her _Cass_ , did Yeimi know to look at them with the same demanding eyes? Did she stay as still and as close to them, and did she know how fast to walk to keep up with their long legs?

Castiel doesn't sleep but sometimes she dreams. Recognition will surface, and she will find herself staring at a distant snowy mountain range remembering the wet squish of snow under her feet after breaking through the icy crust, chipping footholds in the snowbank to climb up and then sled down with little Clara between her legs. The way snow sticks to wool mittens. Emilio's laugh, Clara's red cheeks. It's not hers to have but she has it nonetheless, and it all passes through her mind like a river, while she is looking out the diner window and Dean questions her about the latest apocalyptic developments with a fry in his hand.

It makes her want to visit the mountains, so she does. She is on a peak high up without any trees, close to the clouds. The snow is dry and cold and makes a squeaking sound under her feet, catches in her hair and eyelashes, doesn't melt. Her phone rings, faint in the thin air, and it’s Sam calling. When she reappears they stare at her pale face and windbitten cheeks.

"Cass. Where were you?"

"That’s not important.”

"You've just got…" Dean reaches out and touches the white powder nestled in the hair that rests on her shoulders. It's not far to reach.

She stares right at him, then past him and out the window as Sam begins explaining.

=

Some mornings she can hear their dreams radiating through their skulls. Not quite awake, and still swimming in them. Some mornings are hell; some mornings are nothing. Some mornings  
she was there in that dream so she already knows what to expect: brown trench coat, lake of fish, not a single bite. Some mornings she’s in his dream when she wasn’t really there at all. Her arms full of flowers, her skin glowing gold, water beading. The strength of a warrior of God in the smallest steps, the way she tilts her head upward, the strength in the silence, the silence in her half-lidded eyes. On her wet shoulders his hands are rough, scarred, because the mind is still historical even when she's wiped the body clean.

The first night: he woke and in the dark he rasped low, "You gave me a new start." Unconsciously he touched his shoulder that had healed bad and twinged for years.

She shook her head. "I gave you shelter. For what's to come."

But he was already turning his head toward the sound of his brother's breathing, and they both knew that it was no new start, and an angel's touch no comfort. But he would remember the sting.

He would remember the fear. What it was like, and how Mary his mother said to him, _Angels will watch over you._ Castiel remembered more, another Mary: _be thou unafraid._ With Castiel’s own visitation, Yeimi expected exactly this, and Castiel did not need the names of Santeria to understand how she anticipated the fire of her possession.

Dean had lived under his father’s _be thou afraid_. Wouldn’t he be prepared to look upon Castiel’s true form? He would know the cold heart of everything, even the light. He would understand: comfort from an angel is no real comfort.

And yet Dean dreamed that these hands were warm and soft.

=

She’s not asking him to have faith. She’s telling him he’s ignorant. Is it asking so much, for the Righteous Man to listen to an angel? Sometimes, Uriel used to say, he’s more like the Self-Righteous Man, which Uriel sure thought was funny. She’s anxious for Dean, though; he's got to understand the rules by now: you only get saved so you can owe. And Heaven wants.

She knows how to get to him, too. Big eyes. A touch on the right spot of his shoulder, a sting, a reminder. And the occasional display of strength to remind him who he is dealing with.

The first time she wields the angel’s sword, Dean looks at her in shock. Her dry thin hands, holding something so thick and heavy – it looks disproportionate but she handles it with ease, as though it’s a natural extension of her small body. Really, though, it is the knife that is more like her body, and this vessel the strange extension.

"That's an awfully big knife for a little lady."

She has no patience for his making light. "It's standard issue." It feels big in her hand but she figures it would feel big in any mortal hand. She grips it tighter.

Dean shifts his stance and she knows what he's thinking without listening. Discomfort.

She grips it tighter.

Heaven wants. Eventually, even Cass wants.

=

Yeimi loved snow. It scared her, a little, something so cold. She used to be afraid of her nose freezing off till Emilio insisted that no, it wouldn’t, of course it wouldn’t. And Clara always wanted her to come outside with her once they moved to Illinois and snow fell in winter, and snowmen cropped up in every yard. This is how Yeimi became a master snowman builder: round bottom, round middle, round head with a carrot nose and rocks for eyes, her father’s scarf and mother’s wide-brimmed hat.

"Make it look real," Clara said. "Give it feet and arms, like the movie."

They tried and managed well enough, and later that night they watched The Snowman on TV, and Yeimi felt sorry for him when the lovely hot sun she missed so much made him melt away. Watching it, she shivered, and Emilio wrapped his arm tighter around her shoulders.

=

Set down in a strange land, Castiel is all the generations of émigré: emissary, migrant, exile. Immigrant, Anna said, but Castiel knows that Heaven is her home. She’s not giving up yet, still certain that they can retake the helm with God’s original plan, turn this ship around, make heaven and earth like they used to be. The way they were meant to be.

“You know it’s not going to work that way,” Anna said to him beneath the stuttering streetlight. “It’s the Apocalypse coming. That’s the end.”

“It can still be stopped.”

Anna looked down at her with a crease wrinkling her young forehead. “We have to hope so, don’t we.”

=

Castiel is getting to know her body, quietly. She lets its fingertips roll over it, lets it roll beneath her fingers, like wind skimming the swells, her hands over her dark breasts like cloud shadows move over mounds of earth. She looks. Exactly like mounds of earth. She blinks slow and in the slow blinking imagines what she looks like, the slow beat of eyelashes over clear brown eyes. She doesn’t know what that blinking looks like. When she looks in the mirror, she can’t see what she looks like with her eyes closed. When this body was still Yeimi, and when she was still the angel Castiel looking down, it wasn’t that kind of looking. It was looking at the rapid movement of everything within this body. It was looking at Yeimi’s heart, at her willing mind, at her dreams – this masterpiece of God’s creation

Castiel has missed something, perhaps, when she considers things like Yeimi’s memories of childbirth and embrace, or the manner in which Dean looks at her, looks away from her.

=

They say “mother tongue” for a reason. The Word God has given to His children, small syllables repeated in comfort, lips wet with spit and milk. And then they grow up, and then they don’t call much anymore.

Like Emilio told Clara, You speak to me in Spanish. Your blood is my blood, your mother and I, our blood. And Cuba is in our blood. This language. Like Yeimi wrote in the little notebook  
she keeps in her winter trenchcoat: Guillén – Caña – _el sangre que se nos va._ The blood that flows from us – out and away.

But she’ll come back at the end of the day, Yeimi thinks as she watches Clara flounce off with her friends. She’ll come home and know that she’s Cuban, that La Virgen de Caridad del Cobre watches over her, that the Sky Father Changó has her head as he has her mother’s and her grandmother’s. Like when Yeimi saw her grandmother dancing when the spirit took her over, knew that body for her mother’s body, and her mother’s soon enough her own. Your grandmother is a caballo, her mother said, and Yeimi had wished she never knew they named it like that. Her grandmother was a horse being ridden, but Yeimi still prayed to him in the form and image of Santa Barbara that he, that she, would fill her with joy.

Now, many years and many many miles later, she prays as a mother. She prays for Clara to Yemayá, the tender mother of the seas. One day Clara will know who she is and what God intends for her. The Orishas will know her, and her body will dance because it will be so full, it can do nothing else. It was made to do this. One day Clara will know that it’s not English or Spanish but this blood that runs through her veins.

=

It’s a problem, isn’t it, as Anna’s presence reminds Castiel.

Dean will sleep with Anna because Anna is human. Anna is warm in a way that Cass isn't and probably never will be. But Anna has her own agenda and Castiel's… is the Winchesters. Sam and Dean. Mostly Dean.

Still, there is not such a great distance between what they are, Anna and Cass.

Dean will sleep with Anna because Anna is warm and looks at him in this soft strong way with her soft strong body. While Cass is hard. Like the knife she carries and the way she speaks. That's what she needs to be. Cass doesn't envy Anna her graceless flesh and fiery hair. There's no point. Because in the end Anna is off and away, like they all knew she would be, and it's Cass and Dean and Sam again, and everyone is just fine with that.

=

Yeimi (and Castiel) will always remember the dream.

“I am a warrior of God,” the voice said, and trembling even in her sleep Yeimi saw the face of Santa Barbara, Changó, the red robe billowing, the sword and the cup shining.

The woman did not say, _Tell me His will._ Castiel would have expected that. She said, “Take me.”

It was that simple.

“But please,” she said, “please tell Yemayá to care for my daughter.”

Castiel nods. What else?

Santa Barbara touches two fingers to Yeimi’s brow, and Yeimi receives her benediction.

=

Yeimi (and Castiel) will always remember the end.

“Clara,” she said. But it was not Clara, and it was not joy that shone in her eyes. Joy was hardly a day ago when Clara saw her mother again, when her mother returned to her. This was not Clara.

“No,” she said to Castiel. “Take me.” Her daughter’s hands touched her face. “Take me.”

It was not joy that shone in Clara’s eyes, no matter how Yeimi yearned for it.

=

In Carthage, Missouri, Cass gives in to her body. She gives of her body to him, gives in to the dark eyes, the press of flesh against her slowly yielding grace.

Cut off from the Host, she feels the shadowy encroach of mortal weakness and sets her jaw harder, squints harder against it. But maybe Dean would call it tenderness, flesh giving not to the knife but to soft lips, murmuring bland syllables, voice weary like the stony fields. He looks young and reverent from under his hooded eyes, reminding her of what it felt like to overhear prayers. He kisses her belly with soft lips made for worship.

"Are you - I mean can - I'm not going to get you knocked up, am I?" Because he is imagining the half-winged thing they might make, the flood of light and window-shattering breath with his father's eyelashes, and he is afraid.

"I am not a woman." This body is static. She breathes, perhaps, and little else. She doesn't say: Heaven is barren.

Cass wants and it's pulling her downward, ever downward. She'll burn for this want; if not by hell, then by the terminal nerve-ends of mortality.

=

This is language, el sangre que se nos va. Like the Aztecs pierced the tongue with cactus spines, they knew that to talk to heaven you needed the strength of the flesh. The way blood sings in the veins, it is real; for a brief moment she felt it when she was blasted out of Yeimi’s body.

To command heaven: a line here, a swoop there, a circle and the heavy press of a palm. The birth of all praxis, the power of all sacrifice: to command the gods. Dean never knew but for all her raw and real power, Cass is at his mercy in the smallest of offerings.

Cass spent almost a year hiding this from Dean. Knowing how, at first, he'd want to use it to send her away, frustrate her, get her to free the poor girl from her angelic rider. She's got him now, though. Or really, he's got her. Or really, alone in the freedom of a moment's silence in the green room, the anonymous gap between Zachariah's visitations, they're all each other's got and the only tools are body and blood. None of them are Castiel’s, but she wields them anyway, remaining silent but writing on the wall a command as loud as anything. That is Castiel’s act of rebellion. The sacrifice and the shout, wordless, that no one lets loose – not Dean, not Castiel, not Yeimi.


End file.
